Literacy activities
beach_ball.jpg
(iStock International Inc. 2008)

When developing a childs early literacy skills there are many different types of literacy activities that teachers can use. These literacy activities can vary in the type of literacy that they are teaching. For example, whether they are teaching reading, writing, speaking, handwriting or comprehension. The literacy activities can also vary in the degree of difficulty. For example, you would not give the same reading comprehension activity to a child in prep as you would give to a child in grade three.
Some literacy activities that I have encountered so far in my studies have been:

HANDWRITING- A useful activity for handwriting is to give the children a ruled A4 peice of paper displaying the correct formation of the letters of the alphabet in both upper and lower case. For example, Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp etc. These letters are made up of dotted lines, so they can be traced over easily. The children are then asked to trace over the letters in the hope that childrens handwriting will eventually display correct letter formations.

COMPREHENSION- A useful activity for reading comprehension is presenting students with a short passage to read. Once they have read the passage they are then presented with a set of questions about the text they have just read ensuring that they were not only able to read the words but that they understoood them and gained meaning from them.

PHONICS- A useful activity for developing a childs phonemic awareness is placing several objects on the table. These could include a ball, flower, hat, spoon and a pencil. Then place five cards on the table with the letters Bb, Ff, Hh, Ss and Pp on them. Then ask the children to match the item with the letter it starts with which would be Ball (Bb), Flower (Ff), Hat (Hh), Spoon (Ss) and Pencil (Pp). This gets the children thinking about the sounds that certain letters make, and in this case the sounds that the first letter of a word makes.

By Ashleigh Smith 700180008